Applications

Opal Kelly FPGA modules are the perfect fit for many applications. We’ve identified three primary areas where our devices offer the most value and help you select the best product for your solution.

Integration

Evaluation

Acceleration

Development Boards / Evaluation Boards / Integration Modules

Opal Kelly FrontPanel-enabled devices are production-readyIntegration Modules. They are specially crafted to be integrated into your final product design. Their small size and connector placement helps them adapt to product enclosures. Our FrontPanel SDK is licensed for distribution along with your product and our driver-only installer makes software installation simple and easy. We provide comprehensive documentation, mechanical drawings, 3D models, and reference designs to help you build your perfect product. Product lifecycle is managed with careful consideration during the component selection phase. Whenever possible, compatible product updates are made during the product lifetime if parts go obsolete. Finally, we provide an array of products with various configurations to help meet your design goals and cost targets. Want to see some examples? Click here to see what some our customers have done.

Evaluation Boards are typically a “chip-on-a-board” presentation with a large array of available peripherals so that you can experiment with IP and become comfortable with the manufacturer’s product and design tool flow. These boards are very low cost because the component costs are often subsidized by the manufacturer to accomplish a “design win” and do not typically have board support from value added software such as the FrontPanel SDK. They are great for experimentation and evaluation, but poorly suited to integration in most applications. Schematics and layout files are usually available as reference designs.

Development Boards are similar to Evaluation Boards and are also usually in a “chip-on-a-board” presentation. They are often smaller and less populated than eval boards, and sometimes have support of open-source communities. They are also great platforms for experimentation and evaluation. Unfortunately, since product lifecycle and compatibility are not curated, they are also not usually a good fit for product integration.

FPGA-on-Module boards are integrated modules with the FPGA and essential peripherals (such as power supplies and memory components). These devices are lifecycle managed and designed in attractive form factors to make them suitable for integration. These devices do not have the FrontPanel interface and are not supported by our FrontPanel SDK and are intended for integrations where FrontPanel connectivity is not required. We identify these modules in our product matrix with the icon.

Integration

Focus on the aspects of your project that provide the most value to you and your customers. Using an Opal Kelly FrontPanel-enabled device means you spend more time making a great product and less time trying to interface your device hardware to your PC software.

FrontPanel devices are great for prototype construction, low-cost in-house test equipment replacements, custom hardware such as manufacturing line vision systems, and low- to medium- volume production devices.

Opal Kelly makes every effort to assure that our software, drivers, and devices have a migration path to new features and FPGA support that minimizes your re-engineering. We also continue to support new operating systems and platforms.

Applications

Custom Cameras

Stereo Vision

Data Acquisition Systems

In-House Test Equipment

Industrial Control

Low-Latency Systems

Best products

Evaluation

Whether you’ve built a low-speed high precision analog-to-digital converter, a high-speed digital-to-analog converter, or new CMOS image sensor, pairing it with an Opal Kelly module is the perfect way to showcase your product to customers.

Dramatically reduce the cost of evaluation board development and utilize a common development environment for all your eval boards.

FrontPanel-enabled devices are available for low-speed serial peripherals to medium speed acquisition devices all the way up to high-speed gigabit transceiver capabilities so you can re-use and retarget throughout your entire product line.

Customers may now engage your product more thoughtfully as they write their own HDL to communicate with your device.

Best products

Acceleration

FPGAs have enabled a new generation of computing power and FrontPanel-enabled devices give you access to that power from the ubiquity of a USB interface on your laptop or desktop computer.

The USB 3.0 interface on our Virtex- and Kintex-class modules transfers data at over 340 MiB/s to feed hungry processing pipelines without the complexity and expense of PCI Express implementations.

FrontPanel HDL host interface and endpoint modules are incredibly lightweight so more FPGA resources are available to your logic.

With high-speed on-board memory and extensive I/O capabilities through standard interface connectors such as FMC, memory-intensive algorithms have plenty of room to operate and high speed acquisition interfaces are only a connector away.